Hannibal Jail and Police Station

My family and I took a vacation in Hannibal last week.  In between camping in a thunderstorm and touring caves and museums I managed to take a few photos while I was there.  For my purposes, the best material lies just to the north of the downtown area.  Built in the late 1870s, the now derelict Hannibal jail and police station building still exudes character and visual magnetism. 

Malta Bend as it was

This building formerly stood alongside 65 highway in the center of Malta Bend.  We drove by as we were heading back from an October visit to the orchards in Waverly, and I stopped to take a few photos.  For a while there was an art gallery on the first floor, and later an antique store.  I drove by the same spot back in April, on my way back from Iowa, and the building was gone. 

Lineville, Iowa

Lineville, Iowa sits on the northern edge of the Iowa/Missouri border.  Hence the name.  I stopped there long enough to take a few photos during a rainy drive back home from Iowa City.  The post office had that certain noble, rustic, architectural quality that so many Iowa small towns are still rich in.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn that David Plowden had photographed this scene before.

Grinding for True/False

Welder and metal artist Michael Marcum carefully grinds and polishes a metal disc as he prepares another metallurgical work of art for the 2017 True/False Film Festival during a work day at the Lab.

Geyserite Soap...Leak's Gloves

I have kept this image in hiding since I took it back in 1999.  I was driving from Columbia to Duluth, Minnesota.  Foolishly, I thought it would be an easy day trip, so on the way up I casually stopped here and there to photograph various things.  I pulled into Queen City, Missouri and couldn't escape the lure of this painted sign.  I ended up arriving in Duluth around 2 a.m.  It was a much longer day than I had anticipated.

The Oak in November

On the north edge of our property grows an oak.  A very large, presumably very old oak.  It was one of the compelling reasons that we purchased the house in 2010.  It lost a few limbs in a tornado back in 2014, but this oak tree is still a distinctive feature of the landscape.  Here it is in early November, framing some of the autumn color a couple houses away.

A history of farming

In the back of my wife's grandma's barn, in rural Indiana, hang these implements that tell the story of the farm's past.  I've long worked on getting just the right angle and light inside the barn to illuminate them correctly and capture these items in a way that visually describes their history and their rugged longevity.  I'm no agricultural historian, but I would guess that both the plow and the other implement, which I think is an early rock-hauling sled for removing stones from a farm field, both date back over 100 years.  This portion of the barn probably dates back to the 1930s...wooden pegs were used instead of nails to hold the timbers together.